NuTek Mac comes

[Eric Christopherson]

On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 11:51 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:

> Of course, today, GNUstep is something very broadly akin to this, and
> almost nobody pays any attention to it. :-( There have been a couple
> of LiveCDs, never updated, and TTBOMK nobody has ever produced a
> GNUstep-based Linux distro.
>

I assume you mean a distro that has GNUstep as its default UI the way
Unity, GNOME, KDE, MINT, Cinammon, etc. do in various distros. Actually, in
the early 2000s there were at least two embryonic distros I knew of:
LinuxSTEP and Simply GNUstep.

I followed LS a little closely for a while, but I don't remember much about
the approach it took. I'm not sure it ever got so far as to really include
GUI apps. I seem to remember that it took a less FHS-centric approach to
directory layout, but it was probably less radical than things like the
Bogolinux layout and more like the NeXT one. I definitely remember though
that they didn't want to just through a GNUstep skin on the day's
equivalent of Ubuntu (IIRC the distro was rolled independently of any other
distro, except maybe Linux From Scratch, if that counts).

Simply GNUstep I really don't know anything about.

There just have never been very many GUI apps using GNUstep. In my
experience, too, the actual experience of using them has been quite buggy,
except for a few smaller apps (smaller = fewer features; I guess that means
less to get wrong). Plus the interaction of GNUstep's GUI framework itself
was, at least at the time, very dependent on the WindowMaker window
manager, which was pretty much a separate product with its own set of
problems (e.g. it's written in plain C using libraries that sort of
mimicked the NeXT look and feel much the way GNUstep's own AppKit does, but
with *no code shared* between the two).

I just recently switched backed to WindowMaker and a mix & match of xterm,
Firefox, Chrome, and the occasional Gtk+/GNOME or Qt/KDE app. I'd like
something "pure" like an all-GNUstep system, but it's just not happening.

-- 
        Eric Christopherson